Originally written on April 9 2024
I have a long range planning side of me, and this was fully in effect years ago, at least a decade prior, when I’d read about the close pass of the path of totality of a solar eclipse on April 8 2024. Oh great, one of the climatologically cloudiest times of the year here in New England. What will our chances be to see this spectacle from any part of the six state region? Well, I couldn’t answer that question years in advance, so that part would have to be left up to chance, luck, or whatever you want to call it. Anyway, at that point I decided I’d definitely find a way to put myself in the path on that day, whichever way I could.
Fast forward to the middle 2010s, and a good friend of mine announces that she is building a house in a town to the east northeast of Burlington VT. At that time I remembered the eclipse just a handful of years away now, and looked it up – right in the path. So I said to my friend “you realize your house is going to be right in the path of totality of a solar eclipse?” and it was then that we made a plan to get together and watch it when the time came. So now, all we have to do is wait…
Fast-forward to 2024. The first couple months have passed, and we’re in March now, and we’re getting close to the time that I, as a weather forecaster, can start looking at the maps and models and get an idea of what the general weather pattern might be as we head toward and lead up to eclipse day. We’ve had a pretty miserably cloudy year so far, not completely atypical for this area, but it’s been cloudy a lot, a real lot. Ugh. The atmosphere has been cranky ever since the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption spewed an estimated 150 tons of water, in vapor form, into the normally very dry stratosphere. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and it was not too long before it had caused a global temperature spike and had an impact on many weather patterns and events. Is this thing somehow going to play a role in ruining the chance to witness the April 8 spectacle? This was my question. The answer would have to wait.
As the days went by, I started to scrutinize “the models”, the common name for the computerized guidance we look at to aid in determining future weather. After some dicey looking runs, the major models came into agreement that a ridge of high pressure, maker of good weather, would be moving in just in time to provide favorable conditions. This was about 10 to 14 days ahead of the event. This is not always good news, because even though our guidance is “good” at predicting the patterns much of the time, it’s far from infalible, and quite often whatever you see depicted 2 weeks in advance is going to shift its timing at the very least, and a fair weather day depicted that far in advance ends up being the unfair day with a previously foul weather forecast being adjusted to the opposite. But as the days went by and the computer model runs kept on coming, this forecast didn’t really change. Can this really be? Can Texas, one of the more typically sunny areas, be threatened by clouds while New England, typically cloudy, is going to be mostly clear? As we started running out of days to count and model runs to scrutinize, it became apparent that we were going to luck out, and that only far western New England would have to deal with some thin clouds that might filter the spectacle a little, but certainly would still allow great observation, while areas to the east were perfect. Come eclipse day, and other than some freezing fog in the valleys of northern New England to start the morning, the sky was clear. This would largely hold, with the high, thin clouds making it into those western areas, but not causing much of a problem at all. We were going to win against climatology. Finally, something planned around the weather is going to go our way!
At this point in my story I’d like to shift focus back to my experience. Weeks in advance, I took the day of the eclipse off from work. Check. I made a list of what my travel partner – my son, and I would need to bring along. Check. I firmed up plans with my friend. Check. With the uncertainty of exactly how many people would be flocking to the path of totality at the last minute, the plan was to leave a couple hours before dawn on the day of the spectacle. We did that. It worked. The traffic up was minimal, and the sunrise over the White Mountains of New Hampshire was beautiful. After a brief stop for breakfast in the town of Littleton NH, it was time to head for Vermont, and in just under 1 hour from there, we arrived at the town of Morrisville, which sits east of Mount Mansfield of the Green Mountains. Having some time before the planned trip to my friend’s place, my son and I explored the towns around the area for a few hours. I had not been to Vermont since 1997, and it was a great feeling to return. I found that it was much like a normal day there – not too many extra people around. I’d expected to see more, but some of them did arrive late, after I got to my planned location. It was there that we then waited for the eclipse to begin…
My plan for this event was to take occasional pictures though a handheld filter for my phone camera. I wasn’t going for a set of professional-like images. I really just wanted to get a chronicle and largely experience it in real time. At 2:16 p.m. the very first sliver of sun was nibbled away by the moon’s encroachment. It was underway! A few high clouds had made their way into the sky above but they were not going to cause issues! The next 70 minutes were spent watching the moon make steady progress over our view of the sun’s disc, turning the sun into a thinning crescent as seen through protective eyewear. If you look at light through small openings projected onto a surface during this process, you see a collection of thinning crescent suns, because through these small holes are projected an image of the sun as it looks in the sky (the way a pinhole camera works). I took some photos of that phenomenon, and a series of filtered photos of the sun as it became more and more covered. And that was awesome. But then came the most incredible stretch of time, and the most anticipated of this event. During the 5 minutes before totality, the ambient light that had previously looked as you would expect on a sunny day suddently turned silvery and noticeably dimmed and the birds that were singing started to quiet down. This in itself was a surreal experience, especially when I could feel the air temperature starting to go down. The final moments were counted down, and then, at the arrival of totality, I liken it to an atmospheric dimmer switch being turned quickly down. My friend exclaims “there’s the dimond ring!” – an effect just a few seconds before totality in which there is a bright ring with one bright spot just as the last of the sun is being covered – a diamond ring. In seconds it is late twilight. The shadows, which were previously fuzzy, are no more. It’s as dark as it would be in the last twilight of evening or the first twilight of dawn. In the first few seconds after we darken to near-night, I happen to be looking just to the right of the blocked sun, and see the planet Venus come into visibility as if somebody turned its light switch on. Two seconds later, to the left of the sun, Jupter is suddenly visible. The thin veil of high clouds makes it harder to see Saturn and Mars, which are also shining nearby, and Mercury is lost in the high cloud filter, but would have been hard to see anyway. There is a faint comet far too dim to be seen, left of the sun, but I know it’s there, and even that adds to the event. Even a few bright stars are visibile in the dark sky canopy at mid afternoon. In a few moments, the horizon to the west is already brighter because many miles away the moon’s umbral shadow, still over us, has left that area. But it remains dark, where I am, for 3 minutes and a few seconds. During this time, the air is calm, and it’s incredibly quiet. The birds and other animals are silent. The only sounds I hear will be the sound of a group of people cheering totality in the distance. But I can hardly speak. My son, brought to a few tears, is speechless. It’s then that I notice I’m not far from shedding a few myself. But the fasincation of what I’m witnessing overrides that. In the temporary darkness, you can literally feel the air temperature falling, and it makes it down about 4 degrees during totality. You know that this is only short-lived, so you try to take it in, but you can never quite get enough before it’s suddenly ending, a quick “diamond ring” on the return side. Totality is ending. The landscape brigthens quickly, the stars and planets visible just seconds before are hidden again by sunlight. The peak is over, but the 3 minutes of totality I experienced was something I will never forget for the rest of my life. And this has an impact on you. Even with the peak behind us, I’m still in awe and trying to wrap my head around the experience the entire time the sun returns as the moon continues its transit, finally finishing at 4:30 p.m. And now I have to get my head back in the game enough to start what will be a very long drive back home. This is not going to take 3 1/2 hours. It’s going to be a lot longer. But that’s to be expected. And I honestly don’t care. For me, it was more than worth being where I was at the time I was. We depart at 4:50 p.m. and I drive most of the trip back, stopping for 2 breaks along the way, and after navigating the crush of cars departing the 100 mile path of totality, we make it home at 1:10 a.m., my son driving the final hour of the journey. And now it’s time to sleep for a few hours. I didn’t take the next day off. I have to be up at 6:30 and at work at 8:00. And I don’t care. That’s so insignificant compared to what I’ll be remembering for the rest of my life. 🙂